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The no excuses culture

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Re: The no excuses culture

#71

Post by posterboy »

randomdrake wrote: post #16

This was a good post and an interesting idea with some nice conclusions. One of the commenters, however, nailed it and got to the heart of the difficulty: getting people to do what they say they will do . Period. Full stop. You can wrap excuses, or culture, or other corporate vocabulary around the matter, but it boils down to that fundamental thing of people doing what they are asked and delivering what they say they…

>You can wrap excuses, or culture, or other corporate vocabulary around the matter

An excuse (ex + causa) is literally an external cause, ie. beyond the responsibility of what has been asked of them.

>Managing people is difficult

>They [military] are damned good at it

Regarding uncountable dead soldiers, who (hopefully) weren't supposed to die, the track record looks kinda skewed.

Re: The no excuses culture

#72

Post by SerLava »

derefr wrote: post #47
Mz wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I think the OP is correct. My father and ex husband were career military and I was a full time mom. Both the military and parenting have this in common: You may not be in control of certain things, nonetheless, you are responsible for the outcome. In other words, kids are autonomous beings and may do things the parent does not want them to do. When the law says money is owed due to the child breaking something, t…

> When the law says money is owed due to the child breaking something, they come after the parents. In the military, if you are in charge, you take the fall when things go wrong, even if it wasn't your fault. Ah, but these are both situations where, to my phrasing, there could have been "enough planning [to] circumlocute the problem." In other words, the punishment falls on the parents or the officer who trained thos…

Would the CIO get fired if two meteors hit both of their datacenters?

What about 256 meteors?

Maybe that's not a bad CIO. Maybe nobody is helped by firing him for sport.

Re: The no excuses culture

#73

Post by CalChris »

watwut wrote: post #64
analog31 wrote: post #24

I've always been struck by an odd irony in academia: People tend to have left-wing political beliefs, but maintain an organizational culture that is decidedly authoritarian. Perhaps this is necessary: I can't think of how else to manage a classroom than to have hard deadlines for things like homework assignments. Even in college, by definition, the work is finished when the semester ends. I'm personally guilty of mis…

There is no contradiction between left-wing and authoritarianism. Communists as they were rising to power and in power were all about that.

Similarly, there is no contradiction between right-wing and authoritarianism. We've seen this in Greece, Latin America, ....

Re: The no excuses culture

#74

Post by watwut »

smacktoward wrote: post #20

I'm of two minds on this. As many of the commenters on the original piece note, the idea of a "no excuses culture" will be familiar to anyone who's familiar with the culture of the (U.S., anyway) military, and generally speaking it works quite well there. It helps cut through B.S. and keep everyone focused on the idea that results are the thing that matter, which is important when results can literally mean the diffe…

On one hand, I agree that responsibility flowing uphill can help with the pushing down unethical things. However, when dev leader felt so much responsibility for all tasks, he attempt to micromanage us all to absurd degree. I strongly preferred when I was responsible for what I was doing, because then other people don't try to constantly control details of what I feel responsible for.

Re: The no excuses culture

#75

Post by mindcrime »

Animats wrote: post #67

That's the Curtis LeMay approach to management.[1] He was famously into management by fear. We see this problem in software, especially in DevOps and "agile" shops, because the process is so forgiving of delay. In a manufacturing plant, no product comes out until all the component parts are ready. So there's a "no excuses" culture about running out of parts, or having an assembly line station down unexpectedly. Softw…

He was famously into management by fear.

What does that have to do with this article?

Re: The no excuses culture

#76

Post by mindcrime »

rdlecler1 wrote: post #15

This is an example of a dangerous one-size-fits-all silver bullet philosophy First, this creates selection for a culture that punches below its weight. Never willing to stetch itself. Underperformers apply here. Second, this is fine when you don't have external dependencies who you can't simply fire. You may have to work at the speed of an organization that doesn't share these values and this becomes the rate limitin…

Failure to create a safe work environment can erode trust and make for a toxic and fearful workplace.

Having a safe work environment isn't the same thing as not holding people accountable.

Re: The no excuses culture

#77

Post by derefr »

Mz wrote: post #60
derefr wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When the law says money is owed due to the child breaking something, they come after the parents. In the military, if you are in charge, you take the fall when things go wrong, even if it wasn't your fault. Ah, but these are both situations where, to my phrasing, there could have been "enough planning [to] circumlocute the problem." In other words, the punishment falls on the parents or the officer who trained thos…

But a parent, or a military officer, or a corporate executive, usually isn't blamed for what amounts to "enemy action"—where something intentionally malicious out-thinks every preparation you've made and goes ahead and ruins your day anyway. Parents, for example, aren't blamed for what their children do when they've been told to do that thing by another authority figure. Executives aren't blamed for rival companies'…

> Other adults being assholes and fucking up my kid is not an acceptable justification for letting my kids get fucked up.

To be clear, I wasn't talking about things that have negative impacts on your child, but rather things that society blames your child for, and then redirects that blame to you.

An example: if your 10-year-old child just grabs a loaded gun off a table and shoots someone, whether this ends up deemed "accidental" or not, whether someone else is to blame for leaving a loaded gun there or not, people will still (at least partially) blame you for that—for (presumably) not instilling gun safety rules into your child.

But if your 10-year-old child is handed a gun by another adult, and told to shoot someone, blame for that would never land on you: society would deem that coercion, due to the power-imbalance between adults and children, just as much as if an adult were told to shoot someone with a gun held to their own head.

You might blame yourself for the trauma your kid suffers from having shot someone, sure. But, in the situation above, I don't think even you would think you somehow held ultimate causal responsibility for the shooting occurring in the first place. It'd be like blaming yourself for a drunk driver driving through the front of your house and killing someone you love: essentially an "act of god" that happened to have been performed by another human being.

Re: The no excuses culture

#78

Post by watwut »

CalChris wrote: post #73
watwut wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no contradiction between left-wing and authoritarianism. Communists as they were rising to power and in power were all about that.

Similarly, there is no contradiction between right-wing and authoritarianism. We've seen this in Greece, Latin America, ....

Absolutely, I agree. I wrote about left wing, because OP specifically mentioned left wing somehow being incompatible with authoritarianism.

I think that only wing incompatible with authoritarianism is pro-democracy crowd.

Re: The no excuses culture

#79

Post by lexicality »

randomdrake wrote: post #16

This was a good post and an interesting idea with some nice conclusions. One of the commenters, however, nailed it and got to the heart of the difficulty: getting people to do what they say they will do . Period. Full stop. You can wrap excuses, or culture, or other corporate vocabulary around the matter, but it boils down to that fundamental thing of people doing what they are asked and delivering what they say they…

> You, reader, put this matter to a test: You are sitting now in your office—six clerks are within your call. Summon any one and make this request: “Please look in the encyclopedia and make a brief memorandum for me concerning the life of Corregio.” Will the clerk quietly say, “Yes, sir,” and go do the task? On your life, he will not.

I had a boss like that, he was an asshole.

The idea that the ideal worker (especially in the information industry) is one that will do what you ask without asking questions or requiring explanation is extremely narcissistic. You don't somehow become a better person than everyone else just because you managed to start a business.

Re: The no excuses culture

#80

Post by derefr »

SerLava wrote: post #72
derefr wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When the law says money is owed due to the child breaking something, they come after the parents. In the military, if you are in charge, you take the fall when things go wrong, even if it wasn't your fault. Ah, but these are both situations where, to my phrasing, there could have been "enough planning [to] circumlocute the problem." In other words, the punishment falls on the parents or the officer who trained thos…

Would the CIO get fired if two meteors hit both of their datacenters? What about 256 meteors? Maybe that's not a bad CIO. Maybe nobody is helped by firing him for sport.

Well, that's what I said above: if meteors hit all your data centres, there's pretty much nothing anyone could have done—no amount of planning—that could have prevented that. (Though there are different scales of expectation at play here—corporations wouldn't be expected to build fault-tolerant backup sites in bunkers and on submarines, but the military would.)

But if one meteor—or, more commonly, flooding or a power/internet outage—can cost your large corporation $100MM+ dollars of lost revenue, beyond just the cost of replacing the data-center—then you've set up your architecture all wrong to achieve the KPIs you're being measured on as a CIO, to the point that you probably don't know how to do what you were hired to do. Easier to fire and replace at that point, because the "average" replacement will likely be much better.

On the other hand, firing someone if a DDoS takes down their business is not really justifiable these days, because the average CIO doesn't have enough experience with DDoSes to know how to build for that case. In such a case, the replacement CIO also wouldn't know, so you'd be throwing away built-up experience by firing them.

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